ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.

Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1615572

This article is part of the Research TopicChallenges and Solutions in Forecasting and Decision-Making in Marine Economy and Management, Volume IIView all 8 articles

Sustainable ferry leasing strategies: the option contract perspective

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Guangzhou Railway Polytechnic, Guangzhou, China
  • 2Shanghai Maritime University, pudong, Shanghai, China
  • 3Tongling University, Tongling, Anhui, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Ferry demand fluctuates unpredictably across different seasons and holidays, posing significant scheduling challenges for operators and resulting in high operating costs and increased carbon emissions. To adapt to market demand variations, ferry operators often supplement their own fleets with leased vessels. Therefore, this paper explores sustainable leasing strategies between ferry leasing companies and operators under uncertain demand conditions, aiming to maximize ferry utilization efficiency. First, this paper develops leasing models under four contract types: wholesale pricing, unilateral options (call and put), and bidirectional options (a classic game-theoretic approach for optimizing decisions under demand fluctuations). Subsequently, it determines the optimal number of leased ferries for each strategy. Then, this paper conducts a comparative analysis of the four contracts, supplemented by sensitivity analysis. Finally, it examines the scenario where an operator purchases ferries instead of leasing them. A case study of a high-speed passenger ferry company in Zhuhai demonstrates that option contracts can mitigate demand uncertainty, thereby improving fleet utilization. The bidirectional option proves more flexible than the unilateral option. However, leasing is not always preferable to purchasing. The findings provide sustainable insights for ferry operators in designing leasing strategies, ultimately reducing operating costs and carbon emissions.

Keywords: ferry leasing, sustainability, Uncertain demand, unilateral option, bidirectional option

Received: 21 Apr 2025; Accepted: 30 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Cheng, He, Zheng, Zhang, Xu and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Chunsheng Wang, Tongling University, Tongling, 244000, Anhui, China

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